As I’m still groggy from fighting migraines, Wolf Howling wrote this Bookworm Beat, a glorious potpourri showing that the good guys are mostly winning.

Today was supposed to be a big day, with Antifa raging in the streets and less-violently inclined Leftists screaming at the heavens. When I search for stories about either of these Day of Rage protests, though, I find nothing. I guess it’s hard to get up on a cold Fall morning when you live in your parents’ basement or partied hard the night before in your college dorm.

I’m a little inert today too for an entirely different reason: I’ve been adjusting my daily anti-migraine medication. The adjustment seems to be working, because I haven’t had a migraine since I made the change, but the downside is that the increased dosage makes me sleepy and dims my mental energy. Both those problems will pass with time, but for now, even though I’m paying attention to the news, I can’t seem to rouse myself to write about it.

Fortunately for the Bookworm’s reputation as a purveyor of interesting content, my friend Wolf Howling send me an email chock full of interesting information. For your enjoyment and edification, therefore, I present to you the Wolf Howling edition of today’s Bookworm Beat:

The New York-based publisher, which has instilled a hiring freeze, will slash about 80 jobs, equal to a decrease of about 2.5 percent of its 3,000-person workforce. Budgets across departments are also expected to get a haircut, with the worst-performing divisions and magazines getting cuts of up to 20 percent. As part of that mandate, Condé is reducing the frequencies of most of its titles and will shutter Teen Vogue in print.

(Bookworm here: Wolf Howling is not the only one who remembered my utter disdain for Teen Vogue — which I expressed here, here, here, and here. I got emails from several other people and am grateful to all of them for keeping that wonderful news right in front of me.)

A man who had been arrested asked for a “lawyer [,] dog” Depending upon how you read it, the man either called the police officer “dog” (which is definitely better than calling him “pig”) or asked for an actual “lawyer dog.” The Louisiana court held it was the latter and, dogs with law degrees being in short supply, concluded that the police had no obligation to the man to hunt up that particular type of lawyer before questioning him. [Read more…]

Teen Vogue turns against Israel with a gauzy, one-sided view of Palestinians. This sewage-like flow of Leftist ideology traces back to American academia.

For those naive enough to think that Teen Vogue is a fashion magazine, please disabuse yourself of that notion as quickly as possible. It is, in fact, a hard Left propaganda vehicle that slips into people’s homes under the guise of fashion. It came into my house, for example, when my daughter got a free subscription automatically delivered to her after ordering clothes from an online site that caters to teenagers.

I’ve documented several times that the magazine’s primary purpose is to sell Leftism on every subject under the sun including, but not limited to, campus rape, Woodie Guthrie-esque communism; the entire spectrum of the LGBT social and political push against traditional Western value’, misanthropic “feminism”; and abortion. (You can see these earlier posts here, here, and here.) I was going to say of Teen Vogue that “any resemblance to an actual fashion magazine is pure coincidental,” but that’s not true. Teen Vogue’s deliberately takes on the protective coloring of a fashion magazine, but don’t be fooled: its purpose is Leftist indoctrination, pure and simple.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the magazine amped up the Leftist propaganda by advocating for the Palestinians without any recognition of Israel’s historic and legal rights to the land, or the virtue of her conduct:

Despite the ambitious title and long length, the one-sided account omits many things that teens trying to learn about current events ought to know and instead reads like a fact sheet from the Palestinian side of the issue.

Author Emma Sarran Webster has no apparent knowledge or background on the complex issues involved, billing herself as an expert on health and beauty with a “deep love for social media and cat videos.” She relies heavily in the article on a single “expert,” University of Wisconsin professor Nadav Shelef. Shelef’s writing, which has been praised by far-left professors, focuses heavily on settlements, and as a result, Webster’s article also focuses overwhelmingly on “controversial” settlements as the central issue. This, while completely ignoring Palestinian incitement and incentivizing of violence, as well as Palestinian intransigence. In fact, Webster includes an entire four-paragraph section subtitled, “What are settlements, and why are they so controversial?”

Yet, there is no section on Palestinian cash payments to convicted terrorists or to the families of terrorists who were killed, and there is no section that discusses the glorification of violence in the Palestinian government and society.

The article also omits discussion of historical Jewish ties to Israel and, unconscionably, the repeated Palestinian rejection of extensive Israeli peace offers. Where was the section on Arafat and Abbas walking away from the creation of a Palestinian state?

In addition, the article contains several misrepresentations: it references “Palestinians” who lived a century ago, and says that in 1948 Arab nations “began fighting on behalf of Palestine.” It misrepresents UN Resolution 242 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and fails to put UN statements in the context of that body’s well-documented bias.

CAMERA is polite in its comments and imputes the myriad omissions and errors to ignorance. I would not be so polite. I’ve been following the magazine long enough to understand that it is selling the current Progressive point of view, which is a long way from the centrism people remember from the pre-1990s Democrat party.

One of the hallmarks of the new Democrat party — a party that used to be part of America’s overall support for beleaguered Israel, a liberal democracy surrounded by genocidal tyrannies — is its hostility to Israel. You need look no further than the race for DNC chair, when Keith Ellison, a long-time purveyor of antisemitic canards and a friend of famed antisemites, came within a hairbreadth of winning.

I’m about to get on my particular monomania train here, so feel free to turn away from the article about now. My monomania is about American colleges and universities. It’s easy for conservatives (including friends of Israel) to point to the media and Hollywood as the culture infecting America’s traditional commitment to liberty at home and abroad. That’s not where the problem started, though, and that’s not where the canker of Leftism is most strong. All of America’s problems are tied to its colleges.

Teen Vogue, a pernicious hard-Left magazine that enters homes uninvited, has created the ultimate gift guide: what to give your friend after her abortion.

I am not Teen Vogue’s target audience. Nevertheless, it ended up in my home because an online clothes site subscribed my daughter to the magazine. One glance told me that an ideological virus was invading my home, as you’ll see from the issue I reviewed here. Reading the magazine would infect the reader with the entire social justice agenda: a world in which gays, trans people, Muslims, women, minorities, and whatever other victim groups I’ve forgotten are perpetually on the receiving hand of harassment and disrespect from a privileged white male establishment. Thankfully, because I got to the mail first, my daughter never even knew Teen Vogue had come near our house.

Teen Vogue popped up on my screen again after the Super Bowl. It turns out I wasn’t the only one to realize that Lady Gaga, by immediately following a few lines of America, the Beautiful, with a stirring rendition of a few lines from Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land was scoring heavy-handed hard-Left political points. Gutherie was a die-hard communist and he wrote This Land is Your Land as a protest about the evil capitalism blighting the American landscape (the lyrics in the verses nobody sings are the giveaway).

Teen Vogue’s online site figured it out too, thanks to its online editor, Phillip Picardi. Incidentally, if you check out his Twitter feed, you’ll get a very good insight into the mindset of the people behind a magazine that naive parents might think is related to the fashion magazine of old:

Hard Left Teen Vogue instantly caught on to something too many conservatives missed, which is that Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl half-time show was anything but non-political. Before I get to Teen Vogue’s completely correct argument, I need to fill you in on a couple of background facts, so please bear with me here.

The first thing is that you need to know a little about Teen Vogue. It’s not a magazine I would normally read, as I am neither a teenager nor interested in fashion, with fashion, once upon a time, having been Vogue’s purview.

Teen Vogue came into my home as a freebie when one of the Little Bookworm’s ordered clothes from an online purveyor. I am incredibly grateful that my Little Bookworm was not interested in the publication because, once I sat down and really looked at it, I discovered that it’s a hardcore, hard-Left publication that aims to turn America’s teen girls into fully indoctrinated Social Justice Warriors.

And no, I’m not exaggerating. Last year, with a pile of exemplars stacked on my desk, I worked my way through one of the volumes, blogging as I went. The magazine, edited by an out-there gay social justice warrior, had little to do with fashion and everything to do with advancing the narrative that everyone who’s not a minority is racist, that any man who looks at you funny is probably a sexual predator, that gender is a social construct, and that intersectionality is a necessary remedy for victims of all that is bad in America, so that they can work together to overthrow an irreparably biased system.

Put another way, the fashion magazines you remember from your younger days, such as this one:

Sometimes life has a peculiar harmony. Yesterday morning, Instapundit linked to a post I did in 2012 noting that women’s magazines have been one of the strongest vehicles in America for Progressive propaganda, and agreeing with Glenn Reynolds that conservatives need to get in the women’s magazine business if they want to change the culture. Yesterday afternoon, the mail brought me a copy of Teen Vogue, which apparently arrived here as a freebie after my daughter bought some online clothes. This little magazine, which is directed at America’s young women, proved to be an eye-opening read, and a reminder that Glenn Reynolds is as right now as he was in 2012.

The magazine, of course, is overrun with pages and pages of fashion and cosmetic advertisements, as well as a handful of articles pushing fashions for the upcoming season. What the magazine is really selling, though, is Progressivism. It beings with the very first substantive piece after the advertisements, which is a “Letter from the Editor” (Andrew Bevan, an openly gay fashionista). The letter is entitled “Feminine Force,” which is this edition’s “theme.” To that end, Bevan expresses delight that that, after a brief disenchantment with “feminism,” women in America are embracing the idea all over again:

What a difference a couple of years makes. It was just 2013 when the web lit up with stories about big-time female celebrities who preferred to distance themselves from the word feminist. I’m not gonna [sic] out them here, but you can Google it. Maybe it took a new generation to embrace the term (it simply means believing in equal rights for women!) and to stand up for the cause — especially on social media, which has gained, not coincidentally, a lot of traction in those two years. Lena Dunham, Rowan Blanchard, our wise and wonderful cover star Amandla Stenberg . . . Tavi Gevinson, Jennifer Lawrence, Cara Delevingne, and so many others are using their platforms to support opportunity for women, and the message is overdue.

That is a peculiarly disingenuous little paragraph. While feminism once was about such simple concepts as equal civil rights (voting, owning property, etc.), and equal workplace rights (equal pay for equal work), it now has nothing to do with “equal rights” for women. Women have already achieved those equal rights. Indeed, they achieved them as a matter of federal law by 1964. Now, while there may be a few scattered employers who try to cheat women, the institutionalized marginalization of women is in the distant past.